Word: prefab
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...consummate inside political trader, perhaps the last of the breed, he never lacks new challenges. His predecessors, all the great political bosses and power brokers of the past -- Daley, Meany, Rayburn, Johnson -- are gone now, their reputations eroded by the winds of calamity and reform. Yet if today's prefab candidates and queasy partisanship make some voters long for the old smoke- filled rooms, they can take heart: the legacy of the backstage impresarios lives on in Strauss...
...brings a little creature comfort for Hamnett, Sam and young William (born in 1981), like the getaway cottage the family keeps in Majorca. It also permits the designer an occasional indulgence (her North London office, walled round with papier-mache rock, looks like Plato's cave built from a prefab kit) and a healthy dose of esthetic restiveness. "I try to be creative and earn money at it," she says. "But it's like being a painter and having a gun pointed at you. I envy Marcel Duchamp for just stopping. Though he had a rich wife." Hamnett's Buddhism...
...rock purists, Beehive (which takes its name from the puffed-up hairdos of the early '60s) may be too prefab and refried. The songs are speeded up, the styles are hyped up, and the performances are often camped up. Critics will also note the absence of glamour gold from Phil Spector's girl groups; where is Uptown, He's a Rebel, Be My Baby, Not Too Young to Get Married or the ineffable Da Doo Ron Ron? But Gallagher was not looking to create a Madame Tussaud's of femme pop; he wanted to take an affectionate look...
...movie tickets than ever before. Celebrities are more numerous, but their fame is briefer: the half-life even of putative superstardom can be as short as a year. Fads are announced, exploited and abandoned even before Good Morning America can cover them. Philanthropy has turned into a series of prefab, single-issue Woodstocks (Live Aid, Farm Aid, Hands Across America), and the U.S. has twice elected to the presidency a marvelous pop creature who goads Congress with movie dialogue ("Go ahead; make my day!") and calls military uniforms "Pentagon wardrobe." The original make-my-day movie actor has been elected...
...last count) is a signal social fact of the past four decades, a transformation of the commercial landscape more swift and radical than any other in U.S. history. Strung out along main drags in every city, fast-food franchises become the strip, identically chaotic collages of glowing signs and prefab construction. The helter-skelter of the strip is the urban critic's most convenient cliche --cheap-jack American laissez-faire run amuck...